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Moonlight 1.0 Ships

By Jeffrey Schwartz

02/13/09

Novell has released its widely anticipated Moonlight 1.0, a plugin based on Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0 rich interactive application (RIA) runtime.

The release, which was expected following a recent demonstration of the technology during the presidential inauguration, was announced by Miguel de Icaza, Novell's developer platform vice president and founder of the Mono Project, which developed Moonlight.

"We are feature-complete, we pass all the Microsoft regression test suites and we shipped support for Microsoft's Media Pack for x86 and x86-64 architectures," de Icaza said on his blog.

The plugin can be used with Firefox 2 and 3 on Unix-based systems using the X11 windowing system, he noted. That would include most major Linux distributions, including Novell's openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu, noted Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division.

Guthrie said Microsoft is also shipping its Media Pack, codecs that allow playback of all Silverlight compatible content. "We're looking forward to seeing Moonlight 2 (a Silverlight 2-compatible implementation with .NET support) which the team is hard at work on," Guthrie wrote on his blog.

Ovum analyst Tony Cripps said the Moonlight release shows that Silverlight will play a role in cross-platform environments. "I think Silverlight will be an important technology across platforms and device categories," he said.